This project examines the invention of the ‘the lottery fantasy’: the dream of financial improvement and social ascension through a sudden, life-changing reversal of fortune. Responding to the present lack of knowledge of the cultural framework of the European lottery institution, the project will produce new knowledge on the cultural foundations underlying the emergence of state-sanctioned lotteries in Europe and their impact on the economic and political development of the modern European state. The project is the first systematic scholarly endeavour aimed at uncovering and examining the historical importance of the lottery as a financial institution, as a political and moral issue, and as a broad cultural phenomenon. It will examine how the development of the state-sanctioned lottery institution altered the social fabric of European societies in and beyond the eighteenth century, how the lottery fantasy helped reconfigure the relationship between citizen and state in the same period, and how present-day lottery institutions are still affected by these processes. By drawing on state-of-the-art theoretical explorations into the intersections between literature, culture and economy, combined with perspectives from games studies, book history and periodical studies, the project will provide a systematic and elaborate analysis of the intimate connections between cultural expressions of the lottery and its role in the social and economic realities of Europe in and beyond the eighteenth century, and thus also make an important contribution to new approaches to finance and politics within the Humanities. It combines historical research, textual criticism, and visual analysis, applied on a large-scale corpus, consisting of printed texts and visual art from Italy, France, Britain, Denmark-Norway, and the German- and Dutch-speaking areas.
